Archive for June, 2017

The 49th anniversary of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination by Sirhan Sirhan,

The 50th Anniversary of the Six-Day War, and

The 73rd Anniversary of D-Day.

I intended to write about some of these on their anniversaries, but we’ve been busy at work, and I’ve started looking for another job. The boss has decided to retire, and the company has been kind of limping along for the couple of years. We have also experienced some problems that have had major effects. Among the biggest, we had a dispute with Intuit that messed up our accounting for almost a year, so we never quite knew just how much money we owed or had available to us. Also, customers and suppliers have caused us cash-flow problems that have had significant follow-on effects (hey, we know the economy has been pretty bad for just about everyone, but we’re a small manufacturer, not a bank!), and everything has just added up into a perfect storm.

So far, the job search has been better than the last time I was looking: back then, my applications and resumes were sent out and almost all disappeared into a void … I only got four interviews and no offers over the course of almost an entire year. This time, I haven’t had any interviews yet (one phone interview that was scheduled never happened), but I’ve at least been notified that some of my applications have been received, and received two responses that said I wasn’t a match. One of them, I’m not certain if it was snarky or merely attempting to be “hip.” It was a response, though, so I know I didn’t disappear into limbo.

Dealing with email is taking more time, as well. I normally get between thirty and a hundred spam emails a day, mostly attempts at spam comments for this site. They’re running at the high end recently, and now I’ve got all the job notification emails coming in – around thirty to forty per day. Part of that’s my fault – signing up at one site got me signed up for about nine others, including two resume services. I get what is effectively the same message with the same job listings about three times a day each from around four different job sites. I’m tempted to look into writing some sort of app to filter my emails and only allow emails with job listings through if they contain any that I haven’t seen yet. The listings in the email are short enough and vague enough that I’ve clicked through to several that I’ve already rejected as inappropriate. And almost every one says, “Posted TODAY,” even though I saw it several days ago, and clicking the link produces a “This job is no longer available” message.

I’m also finding that targeting is not necessarily their strong point. While looking for embedded programming jobs in my area, I’m receiving job listing for jobs all over the country (and the world, there’s one job listing purportedly for Denver which actually lists the job as being in Hyderabad) and for things I’m not qualified to perform or have no relation to embedded software (sewage line inspector in Illinois, among others). Not to mention the repeated unsolicited offers to work as an Uber driver open my own State Farm office.

In any case, I’ll probably not be updating this website very often for a while (so, what else is new?), because I’ll be working, trying to get the company prepared for closing down, looking for a job and networking with my various social groups, getting the company’s GitHub page and my GitHub page updated with things I’ve done (I signed up for a page, but have done almost nothing with it yet), and doing anything else useful that comes to mind.